Ethnic Identities, Borderlands, and Hybridity 115sorted wheat varieties simply by resistance, not by any other characteristics—including
poor yield and discolored flour, which would seem to be much more important
for measuring a variety’s desirability (Vietmeyer 2009: 61–3). Second, descent is
crucial: hybrid wheats share common ancestors, just as ethnic identities are built on
the notion of shared common descent. Finally, hybridity can be seen as a kind of
adaptation to changed circumstances, in which the hybrid performs better—secures
resources more successfully—than the parents. These shared features may help explain
the appeal of the hybridity metaphor in the historical investigation of transforma-
tion of old and creation of new ethnic identities. (Later we will consider another
possible metaphor.)
Borderlands, Boundaries, and Frontiers
“Borderland” is another freighted, difficult concept (Newman 2006; Truett 2006; and
the essays in Zartman 2010). It is sometimes treated as if synonymous with—or as
confused with—“boundary” or “frontier.” This is particularly liable to happen when
the concepts are being applied to a physical reality, such as the boundary between two
states or ethnic groups. Consider that fraught space where Mexico and the United States
meet. There is, on the one hand, a very specific but wholly artificial “line in the sand,”
a dimensionless boundary between two sovereign states, which both (but especially
the United States) have spent much effort in locating, and which today is marked by
yellow lines on the pavement at crossing zones or massive steel fences in the desert.
The Mexican–United States borderland, on the other hand, is a zone that straddles the
boundary, smeared out across the landscape and differing in scope and nature depending
on whether it is seen through legal, social, cultural, historical, or linguistic lenses, “a
space where categories [are] blurred and power [is] compromised” (St. John 2011: 5).
Frontier, in contrast, may carry additionally a sense of the territory in which a more
sophisticated (economically, politically, culturally) entity faces a less sophisticated one,
and which seems to offer an invitation to invasion, incorporation, and domination. In
Greco-Roman antiquity, a classic example is the frontier between the Roman imperial
state and the German populations residing east of the Rhine and north of the Danube.
This has often been seen as a space of cultural mixing, where identities may be labile, and
so also a potential space for promoting hybrid ethnicities (see Lightfoot and Martinez
1995: 474, who call for seeing frontiers as “zones of crosscutting social networks”).
A less commonly cited instance is the “frontier” between the Roman Empire and
“Ethiopia” (Nubia), starting at the First Cataract of the Nile and extending at times
through the Dodekaschoinos (Dijkstra 2005: 10–11). (The role of imperialism in this
process may be important too; we will return to this later in the text.) As zones of
confrontation, blending, and resistance, frontiers may be incubators of significant social
change. Consider, for example, the famous “frontier thesis” of Frederick Jackson Turner,
who argued that the emergence of an American identity—or, in the language of this
volume, perhaps, an American ethnicity—was fundamentally dependent on the presence
of a clear frontier between the settled, tamed world and an undomesticated, violent
space needing to be controlled and subjugated before it could be incorporated into the
United States.